History, hysteria and hypertext

A look at how we landed in Cyberland

Clyde H. Bentley, Ph.D.Associate ProfessorMissouri School of

Journalism

Resources

Available in the “Readings” Section• Sterling: History of the Internet• Hobbes’ Internet Timeline• How e-mail was invented• What is New Media?• Four Fundamental Traits of New Media

http://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/

How old is old?

My 1990 Geo – the WWW-free car

Packet Switching

• 1961 Leonard Kleinrock of MIT writes first paper, similar to

• Message divided into “packets” of data

• Each packet separately addressed

• Each packet finds its own way through the maze to the final destinationhttp://www.lk.cs.ucla.edu/

Leonard Kleinrock

1962 - A bombproof plan

RAND Corporation research by Paul Baran • How do you establish a communications system that can survive a nuclear war?– No central authority or switching facility– No single expert

• Information packets passed from station to station via “hot potato routing”

• MIT’s JCR Licklider invisions a “Galactic Network” of interconnected computers.

Networks and nodes

• Local linked machines

• Can only talk to each other

• Node is central computer that connects to other networks

• 1969: First node at UCLA started ARPANET under Pentagon sponsorship (Advanced Research Project Agency)

Internet – Interconnected Networks

A key feature: each network is individually designed and maintained (“open architecture”)

Early Growth• Idea was that researchers could exchange data, work together

• Within a year it became clear that it was more an electronic post office

• But individual mailing awkward, so “mailing lists” created.That created a corps

of users who “collected” postings for their own enjoyment. ARPANET September 1971

E-mail• 1971 Ray Tomlinson invents email program for networks

• 1972 Tomlinson program put on ARPANET

Email quickly becomes main use of ARPANET1976 Queen Elizabeth sends email

Ray Tomlinson and his famous symbol

Protocols

• ARPA’s original standard was NCP – Network Control Protocol

• 1974 Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn publish TCP – Transmission Control Program. Higher level code.

• Later spit between TCP and IP (Internet Protocol)

IPTCP

TCP/IP

• The “ground crew”• Converts messages into streams of packets at the source

• Reassembles them back it messages at the destination.

• The “pilot”• Addressing• Negotiates across several nodes

• Negotiates with other networks and protocols

Popular use

• Browsability is key• USENET launched in 1979 between Duke and UNC

• Networks used TCP/IP to interconnect, hence name “Internet”

• ARPANET dies 1989• Non-official use of network grows

The term “surfing” only arose in 1992

USENET, news groups, etc.

• E-mail like set of discussion groups

• Information is post in bulletin-board fashion

• Can include photos (binaries)

• Nearly 3,000 groups, 7 million words per day

• Immediately popular with marginalized populations

(USEr NETwork)

Thousands of posts

Uses of Internet

1.Mail2.Discussion groups3.Long-distance computing4.File transfers

6.…. But what of Entertainment?

World Wide Web

• Entertainment really kicked in with establishment of WWW in 1991, developed by Tim Berners-Lee

Takes off with Gore-sponsored bill, US High Performance Computing Act (1991)

That’s REALLY entertainment

The WWW gave entertainment multiple dimensions:

• Combines graphics and text• Sound and video• Information can be viewed multiple times (unlike broadcast)

• Consumers can produce their own sites.

The Rest of Us

• 1993 Mosaic browser popularizes WWW.

• Native support for using World Wide Web, gopher, Anonymous FTP, and NNTP (Usenet News) protocols. Support for archie, finger, whois, and Veronica. 1994: Communities begin to wire directly to net

First banner ad: October 1994 for Zima and AT&T

1995: RealAudio brings sound to Web

And now?WWW Web sites• 1993= 130 1999= 9,560,866 2012 =2.4 billion

Internet 2 (http://www.internet2.edu)• 187 Universities, plus industry and government

• Researching advanced applications and hardware

• Current success: multicasting, extremely high speed

• New “new media?” Mobile Phones Personal Digital Assistants, Personal Communicators, expanded use of CD-ROM, Digital video, MP3 Audio

Internet Growth

In 1969, the ARPAnet had 4 hostsBy 1992 the Internet 727,000 hostsGoogle’s crawler now tracks 1 trillion pages, a fraction of the whole Web

It’s a worldwide medium

Internet2: Super fast

04/12/23 – 26 – ©Internet2 2009

So is the Internet a mass medium?

• How does it compete against the “Traditional Four?”– Newspapers – Credibility, coverage resources

– Magazines – Depth, color, niche coverage

– Radio – Immediacy, portability, targeting, music

– Television – Motion, immediacy, nuance, color

New creature?

• A “massively delivered” niche medium

(Vin Crosbie)http://www.digitaldeliverance.com

• Three type of media– Mass media– Interpersonal media– New media

New Media

• Individualized messages can simultaneously be delivered to an infinite number of people.

• Each of the people involved shares reciprocal control over that content.

Four Fundamentalshttp://www.digitaldeliverance.com

• 'Bits, Not Atoms' • Digital Addressability. • A Quantum Shift in Control Towards Consumers.

• Open, Autonomous Systems Triumph over Closed, Proprietary Systems.

But what of old media?

• What value to we put on words and images?

• Are we interested only in utility, or also comfort?

• Who should pay the bill?

Enjoy the ride